How many times is too many for words?

How many times do you need to use a word in one piece of writing or speech before it's too many? 

In the novel 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a word meaning 'rose-coloured' or 'rosy' is used several times. The version on Project Gutenberg translates it in one of those two ways, and there are 27 instances (24 of rosy, 3 of rose-colored). In my copy it was translated as roseate, an uncommon word, and that was certainly enough times for me to first notice it, then become distracted by it, and eventually become annoyed by it to the point where it's the main thing I remember about the book. I'm sure in the original it's fine and probably has a stylistic purpose but it was way too high frequency for it not to stand out for me. Because it was highly salient, it's stuck in my memory extremely effectively. 

In one of the podcasts I listen to, The Knitmore Girls, one of the hosts used the word cocoon for the second time within an hour-long episode and caught herself, saying she was using that word a lot in that episode. Just two uses isn't that many, certainly not as many as 27 instances of roseate in a short novel, but it was salient enough to stick out for her and so more than once was too many. 

Disappearing, and being disappeared

The verb disappear is normally what we call 'intransitive', which means that it has one participant: the person who disappears. Like this: 

The leftovers disappeared. 

If anything follows the word disappear, it's either some extra optional information, or it's a continuation of the discourse and the 'disappear' phrase is done: 

The leftovers disappeared overnight. 

The leftovers disappeared, which I'm very annoyed about because I was going to have them for lunch today. 

If we want to talk about more than one participant, like if we have both the thing that disappears and also someone who causes the disappearing to happen, we have to add in another word, make: 

The kitchen staff made the leftovers disappear. 

English being the flexible language that it is, you can find examples of 'transitive' disappear, which is when we just put the two participants of the action right there with the verb: 

VICE has disappeared the post from its website (from M-W)

But English also being the kind of language that doesn't like redundancy (this is all languages tbh), because we already have a way of doing this with make, the 'cause to disappear' meaning takes on a more specialist meaning than the other one, so that they are distinct in their function as well as their form. Content warning now for examples relating to war and dictatorships. Here's some more examples from Merriam-Webster: 

Her son was disappeared during Argentina's so-called Dirty War.

Under his repressive regime, tens of thousands of Chileans were 'disappeared', tortured and killed. 

It [Nineteen Eighty-Four] imagines a secretive regime that surveils its people and polices even their thoughts, disappearing anyone who rebels against the order. 

It has taken on this specialised meaning of the imprisonment or killing of political dissidents. 

Perhaps, if you're paying close attention, you might notice that only the last one actually has two participants mentioned: the 'secretive regime' and 'anyone who rebels'. The others only mention the person who disappeared. But here we have an exception that proves the rule, because these are passive sentences (He was disappeared vs The government disappeared him). You can only make a passive sentence with a transitive verb, because to do so you need to promote the object (the thing the verb happens to) to be the subject of the sentence: 

I (subject) ate the leftovers (object).

The leftovers were eaten. 

You can't do it with a sentence with only one participant to begin with, because then there's no object to promote. Or, if you prefer, you can, but by doing so you're adding in another understood participant: 

Not passive, one participant: The boat sank (perhaps with no particular cause). 

Passive: The boat was sunk (by someone in particular, though we aren't told who). 

While it is true to say that the political dissidents disappeared, it is more informative to say that they were disappeared, because it informs us of the involvement of a third party who deliberately caused this 'disappearance'. 

Best pub for precisely 8.5km is decent

There's a sort of trope that Japanese has no swear words, and instead you insult someone simply by using the wrong level of politeness. As with all these things, it's based on a grain of truth (there are linguistically-encoded formality registers) but it's also really xenophobic and demeaning to essentialise cultures in this way, as it perpetuates racial or national stereotypes of Asians/Japanese people. Plus, you miss out on the actual interesting facts about Japanese honorific speech if you skim the surface like this (you'll have to go somewhere else for those, though, as I am not a Japanese expert). The truth is often more interesting than the factoid and I encourage you to learn more if you didn't know about this! 

So probably I didn't even need to bring that trope up apart from I like to share information about languages, but some things I saw lately reminded me that English (and any other language, probably) is also perfectly capable of being highly insulting without using actual insults, and we do it with pragmatics. 

First, a tweet from @mralanjohnsmith, his second appearance on this blog in recent times, included this photo and observation: 

"Decent staff 🙂" feels like shade at the staff of another café. pic.twitter.com/4vnzUsTzUr

— Alan ‘join a union’ Smith (@mralanjohnsmith) December 13, 2021

(Photo shows a cafe's outdoor A-board with things like 'awesome food', 'delicious cakes', 'the best brew', and 'decent staff'.)

Secondly, this one: 

There’s a pub in the village with a sign saying it has ‘the best pint of Guinness for 8.5km’ which is so incredibly specific it has to be a sick burn on some other pub

— Pro Pattys Day Account (@steveohrourke) March 5, 2022

Both of these seem to be maligning another establishment but not by directly saying anything bad. They in fact both just say good things about themselves. However, they do it in such a way that we fill in the blanks and infer a whole lot more. 

The 'decent staff' cafe has a lot of very enthusiastic words like 'awesome', 'the best'. So among these, 'decent' sounds like fairly low praise, meaning only tolerably good. I had a quick look on Urban Dictionary to see if the kids these days are using it in a more positive sense, and while there are a couple of entries with that sense, most have the 5/10 meaning. It seems strange, then, to put this on your advertising. The cafe could be saying that, if it's honest, its staff are only pretty good, but given that the staff wrote the sign, we might interpret it as more likely that they're comparing themselves to other places. Those other places may have good coffee, but this place has 'the best!' Those other places may have good food, but the food here is 'awesome!'. And by extension, if this place only has 'decent' staff, the other places must have less than decent staff, and the next level down from decent is, well, not good. 

The other sign, rather than saying too little, gives us too much information. If you said you serve the best pint for miles around, we interpret this to mean you think you're pretty good, but haven't literally done a taste test and got votes and so on. The non-specific nature of the claim means that it's not verifiable, because it's not meant to be. The pub next door might have something to say about it, but a pub five miles away can safely consider itself out of range of the claim. But as it says 'for 8.5km', which is a specific measurement, it just can't be interpreted as 'a large area' or 'a long way' in the way that a round figure like 'ten miles' could, so we wonder what is precisely 8.5km away. Is it, as the person suggests, that there is some other pub within that range that they're saying is less good? Perhaps the village is 8.5km in size, so it's a way of saying it's the best in the village? or is it, as I think I'd be inclined to think, that 8.5km away is a better pint?